Member-only story
Fridays Are the New Mondays
Lately, ‘Thank god it’s Friday’ has become more like ‘Holy sh*t, it’s Friday’
It’s 7:15 p.m. on a Friday, and I’m Slacking my co-workers at Medium.
One is editing a story. One is doing… I’m not sure what, but tapping away furiously on his keyboard. I’m trying to finish writing this story. In our Slack chat, we all agree it is too late and a little too dark to still be at the office. But we’re only just wrapping up our to-do lists.
When did our last day of the work week go from TGIF to a frantic race against the clock? Why do Fridays suddenly feel like Mondays?
Friday’s lack of chill has a lot to do with the new pace of an “always on” workplace and its effects on time management, says Rebecca Fraser-Thill, a career coach.
“We’re so used to getting information streamed at us all the time, we expect or think that we should have the same in the workplace, too,” she says of our never-ending, meeting-heavy, Slack-happy, I’ll-follow-up-with-an-email culture. There’s a “fear of missing out,” even at work — if you’re not in that meeting or on that email thread, you might worry that your work is going unnoticed or you’re being sidelined. So you pile your day with more meetings, which leaves little time for quality, productive, invigorating work.
“I’m a big believer in Cal Newport’s Deep Work,” Fraser-Thill says. “We don’t engage in as much deep work as we used to, meaning we don’t have time to really think about what we’re doing. We’re always multitasking, squeezing in bits of work between meetings.”
Another factor in my Friday predicament predates today’s internet culture. It’s the “planning fallacy,” identified by the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in 1979, by which we tend to vastly underestimate how long we’ll need to get something done. “We’re far too optimistic,” says Dawna Ballard, an associate professor of communication studies at the University of Texas and a scholar of chronemics, or how our perceptions of time affect communication.
Ballard specifically investigates four types of work: concentration, creation, cultivation, and commotion. Ideally, you’d have some kind of balance of the four — time to focus on somewhat manual but…
